Third Party Follies

The name in itself is a misnomer that lends itself to the general rhetoric that follows.

It is in the category of great misnomers. You know, prolife, patriot act, clean air act, freedom act, etc.

Yes, you do take it a bit too literally :P
Then again I am a black kettle.

Well, are they wrong? You must admit that the different wording adds an additional aspect to it, primarily an emotional aspect. This is itself able to be easily seen as a twist since it plays more towards one side and would fit an agenda more so than using the technical term would.
Quote:

Not really. Cannibalism generally seems to be whenever a species eats their same species. Feeding Ham to a Pig for instance would be cannibalism, no? Whether or not the word fits, this is what people general seem to find wrong with it, or so it seems. If so, then it really doesn't matter as our being animals doesn't change the fact that cannibalism would be seen as wrong all the same.

Going outside of that however, human beings are undeniably animals. We are in the kingdom of animalia which holds all animals within it, regardless of what you make of this classification we're part of the animal kingdom regardless of how far removed we are from the others due to our advancement.

NONE OF WHICH HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIRD PARTIES.

This is NOT an abortion thread.

.... Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, which is best known for its advocacy of a hyper-interventionist foreign policy, told me that there was no chance he would ever back Trump. “I’ve been Sherman-esque—and more!,” he said in an e-mail, “since I’ve said I would try to recruit a real conservative to run as a fourth (Bloomberg being the 3rd) party candidate.” He added (without irony, I think) that “*** Cheney-Tom Cotton would be the ideal ticket, but am working on others that approach that high level.”

Conservative donors have engaged a major GOP consulting firm in Florida to research the feasibility of mounting a late, independent run for president amid growing fears that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination.

A memo prepared for the group zeroes in on ballot access as a looming obstacle for any independent candidate, along with actually identifying a viable, widely known contender and coalescing financial support for that person. The two states with the earliest deadlines for independent candidates, Texas and North Carolina, also have some of the highest hurdles for independents to get on the ballot, according to the research.

“All this research has to happen before March 16, when inevitably Trump is the nominee, so that we have a plan in place," a source familiar with the discussions said. March 16 is the day after the GOP primary in Florida, a winner-take-all contest that Marco Rubio supporters have identified as a must-win to stop Trump's early momentum.

“It’s critical some serious attention is given to this,” the source said.

The document, stamped “confidential,” was authored by staff at Data Targeting, a Republican firm based in Gainesville, Fla. The memo notes that “it is possible to mount an independent candidacy but [it] will require immediate action on the part of this core of key funding and strategic players.”

Data Targeting did not respond to a request for comment on the memo.

The research points to Texas and North Carolina as early tests for running an independent, conservative candidate against Trump and the Democratic nominee. The candidate would need to gather over 79,900 valid petition signatures in Texas by May 9 and over 89,000 in North Carolina by June 9.

Only two other states have thresholds that high, and gathering petitions can be an expensive and time-consuming process. What’s more, the Texas signatures would have to come entirely from voters who did not vote in this year’s Democratic and Republican primaries.

But “with 38 electoral votes in play in Texas and North Carolina’s true swing state status, failing to qualify in either or both states would render any independent candidate non-viable,” the report's authors wrote. “This is logistically possible but will require immediate action.”

By July 15, the independent candidate would need more than 460,000 voter signatures to make the ballot in 11 states. Assuming an April 1 start date, the campaign would have to gather 4,345 valid signatures per day to maintain a steady pace.

MINNEAPOLIS — Jesse Ventura told The Daily Beast he will run for president if Bernie Sanders does not win the Democratic nomination.

Ventura was elected the governor of Minnesota as an independent in 1998 after serving as a Navy SEAL and professional wrestler. Ventura said his campaign was so successful at showing an outsider could be elected that Trump and Sanders are “ripping him off.” He bets he can do it again if Sanders loses and the election is Hillary Clinton vs. Trump.

“They’re setting the groundwork for me because if Bernie loses, by the time we get to June, how sick are the people going to be of all these people,” he said while dressed in a Jimi Hendrix shirt under a blazer and SEALs beanie.

“See, I’m an independent and I despise the two parties,” Ventura, who speaks as if he is prepared to tackle you, continued. “I love what Trump’s doing to the Republicans. He’s got them in complete disarray. In fact, it looks like the WWE when you watch their debates.”

As for who will prevail in the Minnesota caucus tomorrow night, Ventura really could not say.

“I support the revolution of what’s happening here,” Ventura said after telling a local that he worked for most “level-headed” news outlet (RT America). “There’s three things where I stand with Bernie on more so than Trump. Number one is campaign finance reform,” two is “the war,” and three is ending the War on Drugs.

Ventura’s main cause of concern with Trump is his hawkish nature, suggesting that the man who claims he will “bomb the ***out of ISIS” will get the U.S. stuck in more quagmires.

True to his independent streak, Ventura defended Trump for refusal to denounce the support of former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke.

“Anyone can endorse you,” Ventura said. “Why is it up to the candidate to denounce any endorsement? In our country you are free to vote for whoever you want to vote for. If David Duke wants to vote for Donald Trump, he’s welcome to do that. I think the media is out of line to think a candidate immediately has to denounce somebody.”

Ventura said the media should give Trump the “benefit of the doubt” for not knowing who Duke is (though Trump denounced Duke two days before the CNN interview where he refused to do so).

Ventura and Trump have crossed paths before, at Wrestlemania XX in 2004. At the event in Madison Square Garden, Ventura asked Trump if he would have his “moral and financial support” if he were to run for office.

“100 percent,” Trump said.

No matter what the outcome is on Super Tuesday and beyond, Ventura seemed excited to get back into politics, hoping to run alongside former New Mexico governor and libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, a personal friend.

“Jesse Ventura is a bright, shining new face who comes riding in on a white stallion to save the country,” Ventura said, describing what would be counted as one of the most surreal scenes in American politics.

Before taking up the politician mantle once again, Ventura may need to improve at one thing: taking pictures with fans.

“Don’t put it on the *** Internet,” Ventura, stone-faced, said as someone snapped an iPhone picture with an excited admirer in the convention center.

The first few pages were funny. Here in France we have a blank paper where we can write any name we want. Your neighbour, Darth Vader, anything.

Pretty sure Darth Vader got at least 2 or 3% last elections.

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday he would not mount an independent bid for the U.S. presidency because he feared it would increase the chances that Republicans Donald Trump or Ted Cruz could end up in the White House.

A billionaire media mogul who combined business-friendly fiscal policies with liberal views on gun control and other social issues, Bloomberg could have potentially appealed to centrist voters in a year when candidates from the far left and right of the political spectrum have gained traction.

But Bloomberg, 74, said he had concluded that any candidate would be unlikely to win a clear majority in a three-person race. That would throw the election into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which would be able to hand the White House to Trump, a real-estate billionaire, or Cruz, a conservative U.S. senator from Texas.

"That is not a risk I can take in good conscience," he wrote on Bloomberg View, an opinion website that is part of his media empire.

Bloomberg never received much interest from American voters. About 12 percent of likely voters said they would support him in a three-way race for president with Democrat Hillary Clinton and Trump, according to a Reuters/Ipsos national poll conducted from Wednesday to Monday.

Among respondents, 41 percent said they would support Clinton and 31 percent would support Trump. The poll of 1,695 likely voters had a credibility interval of 3 percentage points.

Bloomberg said Trump, who is leading the battle to win the Republican nomination for the Nov. 8 election, had backed policies that would undermine religious tolerance and threaten national security.

Trump has called for building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, deporting the country's illegal immigrants and temporarily barring Muslims from entering the country.

"He has run the most divisive and demagogic presidential campaign I can remember, preying on people's prejudices and fears," Bloomberg wrote of Trump. He said Cruz, a favorite of evangelicals and the conservative Tea Party movement, was divisive as well.

'EXTREMISM ON THE MARCH'

Bloomberg also hit out at Clinton and her rival for the Democratic nomination, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, for criticizing free trade and the financial industry.

"Extremism is on the march, and unless we stop it, our problems at home and abroad will grow worse," he wrote.

Spokespeople for Trump and Cruz did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Bloomberg's criticism.

Bloomberg founded and is majority owner of Bloomberg L.P., a news and financial information provider that competes with Thomson Reuters Corp TRI.TO.

The fear of a general election contest between Trump and Sanders, a democratic socialist, had driven Bloomberg to begin seriously exploring an independent run, a senior adviser said on condition of anonymity.

But with Clinton pulling away from Sanders in the Democratic race, Bloomberg concluded the path to victory and the rationale for running were gone, the aide said.

Clinton reacted to the news with polite praise, saying she had the "greatest respect" for Bloomberg. "He has to make his own decisions, but I look forward to continuing to work with him," she said on Fox News.

Sanders, when asked about Bloomberg's decision not to run, said election laws should be changed to make it easier for people who are not rich, or not friendly with rich people, to run for office.

"I think it's a bad idea for American democracy that the only people who feel in many ways they can run for president are people who have so much money," he said on Fox News.

(Additional reporting by Chris Kahn and Jonathan Allen; Editing by Alistair Bell and Peter Cooney)

This article was funded in part by SAP. It was independently created by the Reuters editorial staff. SAP had no editorial involvement in its creation or production.

Bloomberg opts out of U.S. presidential bid, calls for centrism

Dropping out with "I might be too popular, guys, guess I can't run" is a smooth move though, very Trumpian in its complete denial of reality

Three influential leaders of the conservative movement have summoned other top conservatives for a closed-door meeting Thursday in Washington, D.C., to talk about how to stop Donald Trump and, should he become the Republican nominee, how to run a third-party “true conservative” challenger in the fall.

The organizers of the meeting include Bill Wichterman, who was President George W. Bush’s liaison to the conservative movement; Bob Fischer, a South Dakota businessman and longtime conservative convener; and Erick Erickson, the outspoken Trump opponent and conservative activist who founded RedState.com.

"Please join other conservative leaders to strategize how to defeat Donald Trump for the Republican nomination,” the three wrote in an invitation obtained by POLITICO that recently went out to conservative leaders, "and if he is the Republican nominee for president, to offer a true conservative candidate in the general election."

The meeting is scheduled for Thursday, two days after winner-take-all Florida and Ohio vote in what many Republican operatives believe will determine whether Trump is on an unstoppable march to the nomination or is likely to stall out short of the 1,237 delegates he needs.

One person involved in the gathering described it as in the “embryonic” stages.“ It’s not like there’s a royal grand plan that’s going to be unfurled," this person said. "People aren’t giving up on the Republican Party yet."

Still, Wichterman, Fischer, and Erickson represent three boldface names to host such a gathering. All three have deep ties to the social conservative movement, which Ted Cruz has tried to unite behind his candidacy.

Wichterman, in addition to his top job for Bush, served as a senior adviser to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. He now works for Covington, a law firm in Washington, D.C.

Fischer, in 2012, helped bring together a group of more than 200 conservatives from across the country to unite around Rick Santorum’s candidacy. An event in Houston he put together raised $1.8 million in a day.

And Erickson, who has sparred publicly with Trump for months online and on his radio show, has previously said, “I will not be voting for Donald Trump at all. Ever.”

Other GOP donors, who are interested in exploring the possibility of challenging Trump, recently commissioned a study on the feasibility of launching a last-minute, independent bid.

Trump dominates the GOP delegate count with nearly half of the states already voting in the Republican presidential primary. According to POLITICO's calculations, he would need to amass slightly more than 50 percent of the remaining delegates to secure the nomination outright.

Trump already knows how to deny reality.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Seizing new fuel for his appeal to Donald Trump's critics, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson has joined forces with another former Republican governor to strengthen his Libertarian presidential bid.

William Weld, who served two terms as the Republican governor of Massachusetts in the 1990s, will announce plans Thursday to seek the Libertarian Party's vice presidential nomination, Johnson confirmed in a Wednesday interview with the Associated Press. The pair met privately in Las Vegas over the weekend when Weld agreed to run as Johnson's running mate in the party's upcoming nominating convention and into the general election.

"We got together and shook hands on it," Johnson told the AP in an interview in Salt Lake City, where his underdog presidential campaign is based. "It brings an enormous amount of credibility to what it is I'm doing. I'm unbelievably flattered by this and humbled."

Johnson is casting himself as the best — and perhaps only — alternative to Trump, as the New York billionaire's Republican critics struggle to identify another third-party candidate.

Johnson earned just 1 percent of the national vote during his 2012 presidential run, but reminds reluctant conservatives that he'll likely be the only third-party candidate on the ballot in all 50 states this fall.

Weld, a well-respected former governor in the Northeast, offers Johnson some credibility and badly needed fundraising prowess. The 70-year-old will announce his vice presidential bid in New York on Thursday, Johnson said.

"He could be a huge influence when it comes to fundraising. Huge," said Johnson, whose campaign had only $35,000 in the bank at the end of March. "That was something that he in fact volunteered — that he enjoys doing it."

Weld was an active fundraiser for 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Like Johnson, Weld has a moderate view on social issues. He favors abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Years after leaving the governor's office in Massachusetts, Weld launched an unsuccessful bid for New York governor as a Republican and a Libertarian.

“The Libertarian Party is fully capable of rejecting a two-term governor with money for a party activist from Peoria,” said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, the libertarian-leaning think tank, “and they’re fully capable of doing so to show that they’re not under the thumb of the man they just nominated.”

Orlando, Florida (CNN)Libertarians on Sunday selected a presidential ticket headed by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, who lit into presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on immigration and a range of other issues.
At the party convention in Orlando, Florida, Johnson got his preferred running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, in a weekend gathering that drew sharp contrasts with the major party candidates -- Trump and Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee.

Johnson described the real estate mogul's immigration policies as "just racist," particularly the Republican's call to deport 11 million undocumented people currently in the country....

Over the weekend came another -- so far unsubstantiated -- threat of an independent presidential candidate.

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol tweeted a “heads up” that there would be “an independent candidate--an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.” Unsurprisingly Donald Trump then attacked Kristol, saying a new candidate would divide Republicans and allow Democrats to appoint several US Supreme Court nominees.

But this isn’t necessarily true.

News coverage of any potential independent bid has mostly focused on how such a candidate could get on the ballot in all 50 states. The deadline has already passed in Texas and is quickly approaching North Carolina and Indiana.

But if the point is to stop Trump from getting into the White House, and still elect a Republican president, there is another way for the #NeverTrump backers to do it. It’s not easy -- or perhaps even practical -- but it’s possible.

If no presidential candidate gets 270 electoral votes this November, the US House of Representatives decides the winner among the top three finishers. And then the US House, which is controlled by Republicans, could pick a #NeverTrump candidate.

What does this mean for an independent candidate? He or she only needs to get on enough state ballots (and win in those states) to deny Clinton and Trump the necessary electoral votes.

As polls have shown over the last few weeks, there is at least a political argument for a third party candidate. Trump and Clinton are the least-liked candidates heading into a general election in presidential polling history.

This means that if a credible candidate got on the ballot in, for example, 10 states, they could win enough votes to deny Clinton and Trump of the magic number they would need (270) to win the White House. And the independent would not necessarily need to stick to campaigning in swing states. His or her campaign could target other states with voters who are iffy about the likely nominees -- like Utah for Trump.

But there are at least three roadblocks for #NeverTrump Republicans to pull this off.

First, if an independent candidate focuses on just a handful of states, it means he or she will be less likely to poll at the necessary 15 percent nationwide to qualify for the presidential debates. History has shown that if a candidate doesn’t make that stage, they aren’t seen as an option by most voters.

Second, Democrats start with an advantage in the Electoral College. If you add up all the electoral votes from the states that have voted Democratic since 1992, Hillary Clinton would have 242 electoral votes. There are many ways she can grab the remaining 28 electoral votes she needs. In fact, if Clinton just added Florida to her win column, she gets the White House.

This means the #NeverTrump candidate would have to defeat Clinton in Democratic states and do so with a divided Republican party. That would be really tough to pull off -- and reinforces Trump’s argument against Kristol.

Finally, a #NeverTrump candidate would have to do something that only a few people have recently achieved: Unite the House Republican caucus. It’s likely that many House Republicans will say they feel obligated to vote for the presidential candidate elected by their constituents. And in many of their districts, this will be Trump.

This is all the more reason to keep watch on US House Speaker Paul Ryan. He’s one of the only people who has proven he can bring the current House Republican caucus together. And he has yet to endorse Trump.

Washington (CNN)Libertarian presidential hopeful Gary Johnson is sticking up for marijuana after 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney last week said smoking the drug "makes people stupid."

"I do not agree with that," Johnson told CNN's Erin Burnett in an interview scheduled to air Sunday on "OutFront." "As someone who has used marijuana, I do not agree with that."

Johnson, who was the governor of New Mexico from 1994-2003, has been an advocate for legalizing marijuana since 1999. In his interview with Burnett, he suggested that marijuana "competes with legal prescription painkillers and drugs that statistically kill 100,000 people a year."

He noted that there has not been one documented death due to medical marijuana.

"On the recreational side, I have always maintained that legalizing marijuana will lead to overall less substance abuse because it's so much safer than everything else that's out there starting with alcohol," Johnson said.

Romney -- who has been a vocal member of the "Never Trump" party -- told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room" last week that he would consider voting for Johnson, but had reservations given his stance on marijuana.

"I think the legalization of marijuana on a recreational basis and the legalization of drugs would be highly destructive to our coming generations and the work ethic of this country," Romney told Blitzer.

"Marijuana makes people stupid," he added.